The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Your little note this morning makes me sorry that you were blue so I am writing just a line of type or two to tell you to cheer up. You know that we cannot put hard honest work into things without a return sometime. It may be slow in arriving, but it WILL arrive, so do not forget it. It is harder to wait, than just to work hard. . . . Just keep up a brave heart and your ship will come sailing in. It may be only a little boat at first—those things have a way of never giving warning, but again, it may be a big sailing vessel or even an ocean liner.

  The hardest part of life is waiting . . . don’t I know? . . . waiting for letters that never come, for money that never comes. . . . But women have most of that sort of thing to do. Men, even when they wait long, never have the waiting part as hard as women. . . . Darling boy cheer up. . . . When once you can get well again, things will look brighter to you. . . . I seem always to see you lying in bed, pale and wan, but trying to smile—the finest and bravest boy I ever knew. . . . That from a mother who knows you well and who cannot think of the years when we became so very well acquainted without a few tears of my own unworthiness and complete failure to be the exalted being you should have for a mother. . . . But I believe in you as I believe in a supreme being, and trust you also, as I do Him. . . .

  At the time Effie wrote this, Irene, who is never mentioned in the letter, was three months pregnant.

  NINE

  On the night of their engagement, Mack told Irene flatly that he didn’t want babies, and Irene agreed—though she later told him she hadn’t really meant it and figured she’d eventually change his mind. Together they snickered at the annoying antics of other people’s children. Commenting on Virginia’s baby son, Mack wrote, “I loathed small children.”

  They’d been using some primitive form of birth control involving little brown cones purchased at the pharmacy for insertion. Irene realized she was late for her period as Mack was working on Diversey. Before he had finished, she was sure.

  Though Effie had made no mention of it, the prospect of soon being responsible not only for Irene but also a child, with no job and only the most unlikely hopes of selling a novel, obviously contributed to the mood addressed in her letter.

  Her optimism about Mack’s ship (or at least “little boat”) coming in, proved prescient. Within days, a letter arrived from a big-name magazine, McClure’s, which was trying to relaunch itself and was soliciting short stories from a select group of writers. Mack had already sold some verse to McClure’s, but his “repeated failures” to sell short stories had knocked the confidence out of him: “I thought the Register contest . . . had been a fluke, and believed I was never cut out for a short story writer. I seemed to have no proper plots, and didn’t know how to set about getting them. Still, it was flattering to think that an editor who had actually bought verse from me was now soliciting my stories, and something had to be done about it.”

  He rummaged around desperately for a story, consciously trying to tap into the creative engine that had pumped out Diversey. One thing Mack had always been fascinated by was the Civil War. As a child he remembered a door-to-door book salesman leaving a sample of a book with lithographs depicting battle scenes that had mesmerized him. He always had a keen interest in and curiosity about the elderly veterans of that war who marched down Webster City’s main street on Decoration Day. As he thought about the veterans he had known, he remembered an itinerant handyman he’d interviewed for the Cedar Falls paper. The man claimed to be a Civil War vet himself, and told so many presumptively tall tales about his adventures in the war and out West that he’d become a joke among the locals, who referred to him as the Biggest Liar in Cedar Falls. Mack wrote a four-page story about “a spotted relic in his faded coat and soiled hat” who was mocked by all until the Wild West Show rolled into town and, in front of all his detractors, his tales were certified by the star of the show, Buffalo Bill Cody.

  Mack sent off “The Biggest Liar in Eagle Falls” (he changed the name of the town to protect the guilty) to McClure’s and waited.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  “Irene was down at Mrs. Atkinson’s with a lot of the other girls in the town, arranging a style show for Old Settlers Day at the county fair [when] the postman brought a white envelope from McClure’s magazine. I tore open the envelope and then staggered to the phone and called Irene. . . . We talked it over and we finally concluded that we might receive twenty to twenty-five dollars for the story. The check was for one hundred dollars [the equivalent of $1,400 in 2015]. I began to think that maybe there was something to this writing business, after all. We went to the movies that night and saw Clara Bow, and stopped at Pete Pappas’s place for ice cream afterward, and generally had a hell of a time.”

  Now they felt they had enough money to rent a tiny apartment of their own, and they lived there happily, if nervously, as Irene grew larger with the fetus they took to calling Calliope, a self-consciously literary reference to the mythical muse for epic poetry and consort to the gods. Irene cooked, and Mack typed, writing forty short stories in a matter of months. He had hoped and believed that his sale to McClure’s had broken things open, but that wasn’t the case. Of the forty stories, only one sold, and for a fraction of the amount he got for “Biggest Liar.”

  On a cold morning in December, Mack’s landlord summoned him to the phone. Long distance. Mack’s heart quickened at the thought that it might be news about his novel, but the unforgettable bass on the other end of the phone popped that dream like a bubble.

  “Oh, hello, Dad,” Mack said.

  Mack had not known where John Kantor had gotten to after the stock scandal in Chicago a decade earlier. But Effie had stayed in touch with some of her ex- in-laws, and possibly John himself.

  As I now understood, this was the ultimate mystery about my great-grandmother, this smart, strong, talented, straightforward, self-made woman, ahead of her time in so many ways; in fact, a feminist forerunner, seizing the initiative in the nearly all-male world of publishing. And yet . . . Well, let Mack say it: “I thought of John Kantor, upholstered with fakery. Ponderous, pompous, deep-spoken, Sephardic— She had always been fascinated by him, and had gone back to him cheerfully time and again after he’d deserted her. She left him only because of an obligation to her children: she could not keep coming home, and finding furniture out in the street and her husband gone. Gone where?—with warrants for his arrest snapping behind him. Still she loved him with passion to the day of her death.”

  Was she so blinded by that passion she didn’t see what a fraud he was? Did her compassion not extend to all those cheated by his schemes? Did she simply ignore the harm his manipulations had done her beloved children?

  “Probably peddling some phony stock,” Mack started to say about his father’s new “legitimate” enterprise, but the pain on his mother’s face made him swallow the words. Grudgingly, he had complied, sending off a copy of the magazine, and now the deep voice on the phone was saying, “My son, I am offering you a job.”

  Not only a job, but a writing job. Somehow John Kantor had managed to leave the headline-making scandal of the Consumers Packing Company—where he’d presided over the sale of phony stock as “chief fiscal agent”—behind him to turn up working for something called the Gold-Copper Trove in Montreal. His new title? “Chief fiscal agent.”

  As a principal in the mining company, he said, he wanted to “instill a certain amount of humanity and appeal in publicity.”

  Having read the McClure’s story, and other of Mack’s articles he said he’d obtained “never mind how,” John said he had been persuaded that Mack could accomplish that goal.

  Mack told his father he was married now, and that his wife was seven months pregnant, and a move to Montreal would be too difficult and expensive.

  “I’m prepared to meet all necessary expenses,” his father said—including paying for an obstetrician and the hospital delivery.

  Mack s
till distrusted the man, but held on to a faint hope that he would finally come through for him. Given his and Irene’s (and Calliope’s) circumstances, the offer was too generous to turn down—even if it might be too good to be true.

  As a hedge against the latter possibility, he told his father that they could come only if they had not only travel expenses there, but an open ticket back home, in case things didn’t work out.

  Mack claimed to remember his father’s response verbatim. That’s hard to believe, but I do think he probably caught the essence of John Kantor’s unique cadence: “Very well, my son. If that is requisite to your peace of mind, all I can say is, ‘It shall be done.’ I shall send you the necessary funds immediately. Give my love to your beautiful mother. . . .”

  The necessary funds—including the open return ticket—arrived in short order, much to Mack’s astonishment.

  In Montreal, the next surprise arrived in the form of John Kantor’s wife—what number wife, Mack wasn’t sure. Either way, he hadn’t known his father had not only a new wife, but a daughter, Thelma. Thelma was a comely girl on the cusp of adulthood and about to be engaged—old enough, clearly, to have been an adolescent when Mack had visited his father in Chicago in 1918—and yet, he had never known of her existence.

  Mack and Irene were put up in the Mount Royal Hotel, one of the most luxurious in the city, and the address for John Kantor’s business office. They had barely unpacked when the room phone rang. It was a woman identifying herself as John Kantor’s secretary, saying she needed Mack to bring her the return ticket so that she could enter all the information needed for the expense report. Mack was having none of it. He carefully copied every number that appeared anywhere on the ticket and took that piece of paper to the secretary. The ticket he taped to the back wall of the room’s closet, out of sight, and reach, of anyone who wasn’t over six feet tall and standing on a stool.

  He never knew for sure if what he suspected was true, that his father had intended to confiscate the return ticket so that Mack and Irene would have no escape. But his suspicion that not everything was on the level was soon borne out in another way. His father kept postponing appointments to discuss Mack’s new publicity writing job; kept telling him to be patient, that these things took time to arrange. As the excuses piled up, it became clear to Mack that no writing job actually existed. He was ready to untape the return ticket from the closet wall and flee.

  On one promise at least, John Kantor had made good: He’d found them an obstetrician, who confirmed that all fees had been paid in advance. Both Mack and Irene came to like the doctor, and trust him, so when he insisted that they could not safely travel back home until six weeks after delivery—a common belief of that time—they listened.

  They were stuck, for at least a couple more months. When Irene complained she was going stir-crazy in the small hotel room, John arranged for them to move to a one-bedroom apartment. He even paid for yet another surgery to address the seeping wound on Mack’s thigh (it failed to improve the situation). But still without the promised job, Mack was dependent on the emasculating $25-a-week allowance. What reason his father might have had to lure them with yet another false promise, Mack could not guess.

  In any case, now that he had Mack and Irene there, John didn’t see them much—always too busy with important meetings—except when he was parading them around town to social occasions, where everyone seemed to adore Mack’s father, almost bowing down before him. Sometimes, after yet another big fancy meal, one of the guests would sing a song or play the piano. Then almost inevitably, someone would beg John to recite a poem or a story, as he had done at some previous gathering. “Oh please, Mr. Kantor, you tell it so beautifully,” they would say. John had taken to responding to these requests with a preamble, noting that now that his son had achieved some notice as a writer of stories, people would ask him if he, too, wrote stories. “My answer is invariably the same,” John would intone. “I do not write stories, I live them.”

  And then he would melodramatically recite some alleged experience of his as the assembled hung on his every word.

  Earlier, I had come across a photograph that, absent context, was merely puzzling: a very young-looking Mack sitting glumly at the end of a long banquet table festooned with flowers and beaded lamps and lace as if for a society wedding. To his right, unmistakably, was Irene, looking similarly grim, but otherwise, at a mature twenty-three, astonishingly as I remembered her at a youthful sixty. Standing behind them, and filling the seats to either side of the long table, were an assemblage of elegantly dressed worthies—high collars, pearls, broaches—with pale moon faces all rounding at the camera, registering a range of expressions, from polite to blank to annoyed.

  Now that I was learning about the stay in Montreal, that photo flashed in my mind. I dug through the box of photos until I found it and looked at it more closely: sure enough, in small white type—scratched on the negative by a professional photographer’s pen—it said, Dinner given by John Kantor for his son MacKinlay Kantor on occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday, Feb. 4th, 1928, Mount Royal Hotel, Montreal.

  When I flipped it over, I noticed faint blue-ink lettering on the heavily stained back:

  John Kantor tall dark haired man standing 3rd from left

  Poor sad Mack at head of table

  Poor sad Irene to his right

  I.L.K.

  I recognized I.L.K. as the initials in the gold monogram on the towels in the Siesta Key guest room I had stayed in as a child, which also happened to be my grandmother’s painting studio.

  So the author of these notes knew for sure how poor and sad both Mack and Irene had felt that night—in the photo they look as if someone had just run over their puppy.

  A man in his late forties stood behind Mack, his heavy-lidded eyes leveled at the camera with the emotionless focus of a shark circling its prey. The face had lost that lean, masculine definition that had been so compelling in younger days, his cheeks and chin filling with soft but still smooth flesh. But his hair, that relentless dark wave parting down the dead center of his scalp, made John Kantor instantly recognizable.

  On the back of the photograph in ink of a different color, probably written also by my grandmother at a later date as a retrospective comment on the scene around John Kantor’s show table, it says: Horrors! What people! What a daddy!

  Six days after the photo was taken, poor sad Irene Layne Kantor gave birth to the fetus called Calliope, who became Carol Layne Kantor, my mother.

  —

  After I’d spent the better part of a year shoveling through the material at the Library of Congress, I thought I had every significant piece of the puzzle of my grandfather’s life and it was only a matter of fitting them together.

  But my sister kept urging me to fly down to visit her home in Atlanta and look through a dozen large boxes filled with photos and letters my mother had kept in storage for years, presumably ever since my grandmother had died in 1982. My mother died twenty-seven years after that, and my brother and I, left to our own devices, would have probably thrown them out, but my sister couldn’t bear to do it. Neither could she find time to take on the massive project of sorting through them all, so as happens with so many boxes stuffed with the precious mementos of previous generations, rendered increasingly opaque by the passage of time, they just sat in a dark closet, slowly disintegrating.

  When I told my sister I would be working on this book, she peeked in the boxes enough to believe that at least some of the contents might be of interest to me. I doubted that. The Library of Congress curator who had organized my grandfather’s papers said she had sent a great deal of the material, either duplicates or irrelevant documents, back to my mother, and guessed that the boxes my sister had were filled with the rejects. But I couldn’t take the chance I was missing something important.

  Feeling pressed to make progress on my writing, I made reservations for just a qui
ck visit. My plan was to fly from my home in Northern Virginia to Atlanta one morning, spend the day going through the boxes, and possibly the following morning as well (if I found anything), then fly back to Dulles that evening.

  The afternoon before the flight, when I sat down to print out the boarding pass, I was in for a shock. The departure time was 10:30 the next day, all right: 10:30 p.m. I had made the reservation hastily, simply assuming that any 10:30 flight would be a morning flight without looking closely enough at the itinerary. How I hate nonrefundable tickets.

  Wanting to avoid several hundred dollars in change fees, I decided to go ahead with the tickets I had. Though I wouldn’t arrive until after midnight, I would still have much of the next day to go through the boxes.

  Susan and her fiancé, Randy, gamely picked me up at the airport, then drove me the forty-five minutes to their suburban home, where she had thoughtfully stacked the boxes—big plastic bins—in the guest room. It was way past my bedtime, almost one a.m., but as the bins were literally stacked beside the bed, I decided to open a lid or two and just take a peek before turning in.

  I didn’t sleep that night.

  —

  The most unanticipated result of my exploration thus far had been the size of the shadow cast by John Kantor. Through century-old newspaper accounts, obscure passages in obscure books, and my grandfather’s letters, annotations, and published memoirs, I’d been able to discover that my great-grandfather was not only a horrendous father, but the possessor of an unusual charisma and, in his own warped and minor way, even a historic figure. I’d seen no photos of John Kantor while I was growing up, and found none in the Library of Congress files, but had been able to form a surprisingly complete visual image of him from youth to old age owing to his habit of popping up in newspaper microfilm. And thanks to Mack’s phenomenal memory, and his writing skills, I had developed a vivid mental image of John Kantor’s personality as well—at least through my grandfather’s eyes.